In 2011, the environmental movement rediscovered that its most valuable asset is the spirit that brought millions of ordinary people together at that first Earth Day. Whether you call them tree-huggers, do-gooders, or Americans, it is these millions of ordinary people who refuse to succumb to cynicism and apathy that remain the heart and soul of this movement.

Brune’s problem is that while hard-core activists are as noisy as ever, their audience is shrinking. Also, while he touts the delay to the Keystone XL project as a major win, the fact is a new route is about to be proposed, and President Obama only kicked the can down the road to after the election, he didn’t kill it. As soon as he’s counted the hippie votes in November, he’ll approve the pipeline to appease his union backers. If he wins, that is.

Extremist rhetoric has badly damaged the environmentalist cause. The Danish environmental writer Bjorn Lomborg and two enlightened environmentalists at the Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, put the blame squarely on the environmental movement. It has no one to blame but itself.

Part Two: Warmists

…entries have been narrowed down to the 10 top finalists, which was then whittled down to four by Gore himself. Among the finalists are Greensquare, “a gaming platform that gives you and your friends a new, greener way to explore local retail store, restaurants and businesses”. Gore was particularly taken with REALiTREE, “a digital representation of our local environment and the role we are playing in sustaining its wellbeing.”

“Games are fun,” Gore told an audience at a “Gaming For Good” event in New York.

Or they used to be, until Captain Chakra got his clammy hands on them.

Last week, we noted Newt Gingrich regretted his decision to warm up Nancy Pelosi on a sofa while Al Gore filmed the action. He was a struggling ex-Speaker at the time and needed the money. But now Nancy is upset at being called the ‘dumbest thing he’d ever done.’ Or something.

…personally I think that the aviation industry will go from being a dirty industry to one of the cleanest industries in the world very rapidly because we’ve only got 1700 petrol pumps to fill around the world to look after all airlines.

Part Three: Inconvenient Truths

“They are ridiculously expensive and don’t work half the time,” he said. “And no matter how many are built, they won’t replace coal, gas or hydro or nuclear plants, because they are continuous and wind is not always reliable.” Moore told his audience the wind energy industry in Spain has resulted in a 30% unemployment rate among people under the age of 30.

In extreme cases, entire fields of inquiry can go down a rathole for years because almost everyone has preference-falsified almost everyone else into submission to a “scientific consensus” theory that is (a) widely but privately disbelieved, and (b) doesn’t predict or retrodict observed facts at all well. In the worst case, the field will become pathologized — scientific fraud will spread like dry rot among workers overinvested in the “consensus” view and scrambling to prop it up. Yes, anthropogenic global warming, I’m looking at you!

An extensively peer-reviewed study published last December in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics indicates that observed climate changes since 1850 are linked to cyclical, predictable, naturally occurring events in Earth’s solar system with little or no help from us.

Hippies are desperate to stop the shale gas miracle, and blame the fracking process for earthquakes, among other things. But in the US, fracking and earthquakes go together like, er, oil and water, and in the UK, geologists say fracking is safe:

Fracking, as the process has become known, is unlikely to start earthquakes stronger than magnitude 3.3 on the Richter scale, a level that typically causes no damage to property, and most will be around magnitude 2, said Peter Styles, a professor of applied and environmental geophysics at Keele University.

Normal rules were jettisoned. Ordinary morality was abandoned. Disbelief was suspended. The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired.

In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science. The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere. It’s as though our IQs have all dropped sharply in recent years. It’s as though we have no standards anymore.

Part Four: Global Hottie

Sometimes, for unexplained reasons, it’s good for the soul to look at Eva Mendes. This is one of those times.

Mr. Branson (I’m sorry, but it’s unconstitutional for a United Statsian to recognize titles of knob-ility) might want to jump on the wood gas bandwagon before it’s too late. Just imagine every airliner using a cheap, renewable source of fuel. And all at the cost of having to haul no more than a few thousand kg of clean-burning, well seasoned ash, oak, or pine in an attractive and economical trailer behind each 787, A380, or de Havilland Comet. Think too of all the jobs for professional luberjerks and log splitters this will create. There just isn’t a downside to safe, economical wood gas.